Bah, NerdLord: From Seonon, an Empire!

"Ihr habt nichts zu verlieren doch
Gewinnen könnt ihr viel"

KMFDM - Hau Ruck

 

Dateline: Calradia, 1091. Beaten, bottled in, batty Battania battens down its bottom bastion!

Stalwart Battania, high-flung Battania, Mother Earth's favored flaxen-tressed daughter, land of a thousand pigs and several little ponies, land of... clay... hath been broughte lowe by its fowes. Yet (as such stories go) in the eleventh hour a hale and determined hero named Werwolfe rides to the gates of Marunath to pledge his service to his homeland; then discovers he can't because king Caladog himself languishes in a Vlandian dungeon and thus cannot accept an oath - though he's probably shouting quite a few.

 

Still you can get a fair bit done as a mere mercenary in Bannerlord, even if it mostly relies on Artificial Stupidity. The computer tends to operate with horse blinders on, so even though it'll run from stronger armies, the Battanian plateau's narrow terrain makes it easy to purposely let an enemy army advance past you then chase it into your other allies. Since all my side's remaining lords were concentrated around a single city, this became depressingly repetitive. The same vulnerability which probably dooms Battania when it's just algorithms against each other makes it easily defensible for a human player. Ath Cafal, the village just SW of Marunath, also happens to lie in a cul-de-sac, so enemies would repeatedly trap themselves either trying to raid it or chasing weaker armies in. Lather, rinse, repeat, and thus passed my first year of Battanian military service. All well and good until the king of the Norhern Empire himself parked a larger army than I could handle right outside the town gates.

Note than even though our combined forces (my 170 plus all the parties in Marunath) would easily have trounced King Lucon, they won't coordinate such an attack unless already in the field, and won't step onto the field because they're each individually programmed to stay safe indoors if outnumbered. Catch-22. Not only that, but even when they do the interface is endlessly vague as to which armies will help you or not based on proximity. Laddies and gentlegamers, I don't mind admitting I cheated my ass off at this point, crashing and reloading the game twenty times over until finally managing to bait Lucon away so my idiots would venture out, then looping back to hit him when enough were in range.

 

This would've been easier if I were a lord and could form armies, I thought, until discovering that even after Caladog's return and lordy-looing myself up, none of my peers can recruit enough troops from our meager remaining population to accept an army invitation. Realizing that if Battania is to have an army I must supply it myself, I spend the next year continuing to trap and imprison Vlandians until after grabbing Llanoc Hen Castle we agree to a hefty tribute for peace in Summer of 1092. Building my own Imperial Legion from the Western Empire and splitting it off to a couple of my own underlings, finally I throw my accumulated influence (in part from surrendering prisoners to my King's dungeon) into a desperate gambit to mass our entire force and recapture Seonon from the Northern Empire. It works!

I even have enough influence left over after the victory to squeak through on a 1% margin and claim it for myself. The politics, kid, that's what'll kill ya. 

Home sweet ramshackle, muddy home.

We manage to fight off the inevitable recapture attempt. By winter, with our raiders descending the plateau eastward into the lands about Epic Scrotea, the Northern Empire agrees to a truce. Thus, with a moment's peace and a homestead secured, a middle-aged man's fancy turns from battle-lust to booty-lust. Cue the romantic bagpipes, we're goin' a-courtin'!

 

Now, I'd originally found myself in a meet-cute with one lady Gawen, saving her a couple of times on the battlefield... but as she turned me down turned out to be a lesbian, I decided meet-cutes are dumb and fixed my eyes on a politically convenient marriage to Corein, daughter of king Caladog.

We look cute together. Regal too.

The real clincher was when I saw the good princess' flawless taste in battle-garb.

I'm in love!

We can borrow each other's wardrobe and wolf-whistle in both directions. Though during the war she'd turned me down as beneath her station, after the capture of Seonon it wasn't long before (a quick reload during a failed dialogue aside) she approved her father's approval of my approval of her fine lupine ass.

One wife, please. An' make 'er shaggy.

Technically she only rates 8295 denars, but what the hell, keep the fiver old man, my treat. *wink*

 

While courting and then while we busy ourselves cranking out a couple of heirs, I convince my incipient father-in-law to re-open hostilities with our Vlandian oppressors, having maxed out my underlings' armies until I start to lose money on upkeep. The war drags slowly over the next few years, with gradual, hard-won victories in castle sieges, and a welcome alliance with the Western Empire, the Vlandians' other major enemy. The biggest stroke of luck comes after the recapture of Pen Cannoc, Dunglanys having rebelled against Vlandian rule. Not only does it split their armies for easy field skirmishes, but sets up easy, predictable ambushes when they try to siege it.

Then, when they do retake it, a quick pounce to grab it on the rebound. Thus, seven and a half years after Battania's near-defeat, the latest peace treaty leaves us with far more hopeful borders.

Tho' Car Banseth yet languishes under accursed Vlandian misrule, much of our ancestral realm has now been reclaimed. We set our eyes beyond our borders, where glory and riches (surely) await.

 

So, how was this for an RPG plot? A wealthy merchant returns to save his homeland, outmaneuvers his foes by devious military tactics, seduces a princess (while wearing the same outfit as her (hey, some chicks are into it!)) and claims a title and fiefdom by hiring foreign legionnaires. It's got a plucky underdog angle, patriotic last stands and glorious marches, a courtroom drama scene, the comic relief that your new city's a little bit boggy, one town's heroic rebellion to join its free brethren, and even a love triangle! I've said before (and I'm far from the only one) that Bannerlord has suffered by losing the companion dialogue and small-party adventuring of M&B: Warband, lost some of its monomythic escalation, and sadly, that remains true. Nevertheless it remains a prime example of computer games' potential as creative medium.

 

When the topic is discussed, it's almost always in terms of writing quality, visuals, moral/sociopolitical themes or a really bangin' soundtrack. But all that, while certainly relevant, is unfair if it only treats a game as if it were a movie or a storybook. It's supposed to be interactive, this new electronic medium of the past half-century, it's supposed to be about what you, the player, can actually do. Lay out your own story. An often touted ideal, rarely achieved, yet still the medium's great claim to validity. This? Some AI incompetence aside, this was good roleplaying and good gaming.

 

Health and long life to The Swain of Seonon!

Bah, NerdLord: Of falx and flax

Always we return to Calradia.

The sun sets over Lageta's faded glories.

More than any other game, the two Mount&Blades have supplied me with an alternate universe. Sure, I've gone long stretches, even years, without diving back in, but from the very first single-town beta version a couple of decades ago I never doubted that I would be playing again, every time. And every time I have. Though any individual feature has been done better by others, nothing else has quite matched this particular mix of visual, aural and thematic immersion, long-term plans and tiny surprises, hack'n'slash and economics, in short: a world. Still, let's not get stuck in a moment you can't get out of.

As the War Sails expansion forced starting new campaigns, I decided to play a Battanian hill-man this time around. But aside from trading my crossbow in for some throwing axes and yurts for roundhouses -

- I find myself too easily falling into old patterns. Spawn outside Marunath, pick up a few soldiers, win my first looter fight, then thanks to a price tip in town, sell some iron and tools at a 400-1000% mark-up in Lageta. While M&B1 started from a D&D wandering adventurer band precept (albeit without magic) and only later skewed in favor of running your own fiefdom, my biggest complaint about the sequel has been that it refocused so heavily on kingdom management and massive sieges as to elide small-party adventuring or remaining independent. Objectively, it was a marketing-savvy way to avoid getting lumped in with all the 2010s' Skyrim clones, but it does make it too easy to get caught up in the trade good and army XP numbers game while ignoring the actual locations you visit.

 

So I had intended to spend more time in a small band, doing odd jobs and getting to know the neighbours. But the money to be made from trading was just too tempting. And to carry goods you need a mule train. And to run the mules you need a larger party. And if you're slowing yourself down to almost minimum speed anyway, you may as well stay at minimum speed (since you can infinitely overload yourself after that) and swell your party as fast as you can so you don't have to worry about bandits, and then you realize you've spent your first couple of in-game years doing nothing but running around in circles amassing cash. It were the flax wut done me in!

phear muh phork

As an added twist of your arm, when starting a new campaign and seeing those pristine low-low prices before towns start trading hands and losing productivity, the urge to take advantage of !!flax at 2 denars, OMG!! becomes irresistible. So I actually took very little notice of the new content (Nords and sailing) at first. Most map changes that came with the expansion seem to have made trade circuits less obviously direct, with more options, but Battania being arranged around a mountain lake invites a local circuit every time before setting off. Easy money. That low-brow town/village questing was nice for a bit:

Gangs of Old York.

- but the efficiency of delegating quests to companions is, again, too financially inviting to refuse, especially for an experienced player. The new text events are quaint: 

- but again, since they don't require you to actually interact with the villages/villagers in question, they maintain M&B's old split between playing and sightseeing. I hit up the arena in various towns to swash some buckles, but it's not quite the same. Granted, when battles do come, they turn out to be real nailbiters, with my Celtic archers skinning their teeth on two-soldier margins. But I rarely need to fight. When I do finally get out to sea, I cheat my way out of one impossible battle by crashing the game. Otherwise there's nothing to do with or on a boat. It's your party by another figurine. The availability of ports makes for some interesting logistic shifts, but I can't help thinking War Sails isn't quite the content mix Bannerlord needed to flesh out its gameplay.

 

When the desert (and desert faction) was added to Warband, its content actually connected into the existing map with new terrain (heavily favouring cavalry) new trade goods (fleshing out the somewhat limited existing gamut) and a welcome increase in map size raising supply/quest timer challenges. But Bannerlord's map was already satisfyingly sized, its trade good variety quite ample, mariner infantry come across as pointless bloat, and the Sturgians already included Nordic themes. Installment #2 had different needs from #1, which are not being met by the same additions. Bannerlord would benefit more from more ways to connect to the little people, to take breaks from kingdom-building, to enjoy the towns and villages as more than sight-seeing.

 

Not bad, but not particularly inspired either. Perhaps I can be faulted on my own cupidity limiting my adventures to trade screen ventures.

So next time I'll be making more of an effort at personally running quests. But come on, timber at 5 denars?!? Who can resist, I ask ya!

Cutting through the Treacle: The Tabletop Fetish

"You said that irony was the shackles of youth"

R.E.M. - What's the Frequency, Kenneth?, 1994

__________________________________________ 

"Are you being sarcastic, dude?"

"I don't even know anymore."

 

The Simpsons, 1995

__________________________________________ 

 

 

On the lookout for any system to replace the increasingly obsolete D&D routine, I recently gave Gloomhaven a try.

If you get that character reference, you're too old.

To be fair there's quite a bit of potential there, but it's still fairly primitive with a tabletop version apparently not even a decade old. Leaving most of my bitching for some future date, I'm just amazed at how hard the computer adaptation works at preventing me from getting into it with an utterly bewildering interface feeling like it was designed by whichever librarian won the "most anal-retentive" award in 1973.

 

Sure, you've got the usual amateur designer pitfalls like the camera turning on its own or overextended animations for mundane actions like bending over to pick up coins.

 

Then it makes you pause to confirm the beginning of a new round like Battletech and lacks context-sensitive single-click shortcuts or double-clicks, making you separately confirm every action. And you can't click your other card to change action, have to manually un-click your current one. And you can't just spacebar-end a character's turn; must officially pass your remaining card and confirm. And you can restart round on your character's action but not if you're in the 'thinking' step of selecting an action.

 

But even beyond all that inexcusable stuttering, Gloomhaven's design enters a Very Special Boy category few others have managed to crater their way into. You kinda have to see it to believe it.

Yes, it makes you manually confirm your armour soak on every damaging attack. Wait! Oh god, oh god, oh god, did I remember to breathe and perspire this round?!?

 

So screw that, instead I've been devoting more time to Wildermyth, which will warrant more discussion of its greater creativity (even if it does stumble a bit in execution)

If anything even lower-budget and lower-tech than Gloomhaven, invoking 2D construction paper visuals much like Shelter did, and for the same old-timey storybook atmosphere. Or maybe its creators just watched The Secret of Kells one too many times. Look, at least they ain't chibis. It's a rare "back to basics" game which successfully revisits the core interactivity of the medium, placing heavy emphasis on your pieces clacking from square to square on a board and units and buffs being represented by "cards"

- but it's also significantly more playable than the first example, with more informative tooltips and more fluid commands.
 

On a completely unrelated topic, though I've been burned by Kickstarter projects several times (fuck Mark Jacobs) I got two e-mails in the past month from games I'm currently backing. One gaggle of fringe developers lamented their publisher deals all fell through and they're strapped for cash, laying off part of their team. The others bragged they've now implemented dice in their game. Colored dice! Rolling! Sparkling! Rolling sparkling colored polyhedral pixels! Never in the history of the Arr Enn Gee hath The Number been graced with such grace and gravitas!

 

I shouldn't have to reiterate my distaste for retro games, but they overlap so heavily with the turn-based or narrative-driven genres I favor that I keep running into this utterly shallow in-group appeal. I'm not buying a game about spaceships or fireball slinging to pretend I'm sitting around a table with a bunch of other apes. I'm not in it for the hipster meta-enjoyment of pre-post-ironic non-content. I'm not buying an escapist fantasy to pretend I'm pretending, but to pretend. That shouldn't be so fine a distinction. No cards. No dice. No placemats. No putting my little soldier figurines on plastic bases. Get that shit off my screen. 

It's like fetish porn. You know when you've hit the paraphiliac threshold because a minor detail begins replacing the core activity, be it humping or clicking. You expect a pornstar to have feet, you'd find it odd if they were missing, but you can also spot a foot fetish video if one pops up. Both extremes veer off the mark. Something in Gloomhaven's basic design philosophy emphasizes the wrong visual or interactive elements, consistently and intrusively. It makes you pause for cards to flips over, makes you backtrack through actions as if you're taking the time to physically put a card back in the deck, makes you confirm every sub-step of every step of every action every round as if the mechanical manipulation of imaginary cardboard and plastic were in itself your dungeoneering adventure. Wildermyth places you on a table with cards as well, but after that no longer belabors the point. It's still gratuitous, you can tell the fetish element has been included, but at least there's more to it than feet!

 

Yes, grids look like game boards. So? Yes, the small number randomization or random action drawing of tactical games obviously originated with dice and cards before it was electronic. So? An adaptation can never be a carbon-copy. You're making something that has to function here and now, on the screen, by the rules of electronic interaction, not by the rules of drunken munchkins smearing pizza grease onto cardboard. In 1993 Solitaire may well have been the most played game on Windows. There are reasons thats no longer the case!

 

You hit peak absurdity when you see start-ups on a shoestring budget selling Kickstarter stretch goals of dice animations and plastic feelies mailed to its audience. Could you have paid one more programmer for one more month with that cash? Three months? Look over at your neighbours packing their bindles and tell me again if you can afford to deliver a non-functional product for the sake of a handful of foot fetishists, when your entire industry's already in danger of getting automated into irrelevance.

Game as Service Outage

"She takes a litle time

In making up her mind

She doesn't want to fight against the tide"

 

Garbage - The Trick Is to Keep Breathing

 

 

Let's see, where were we? Night City? 

Nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. I've been jumping in every so often this past year, as one does in these big open world games, but find myself unmotivated to advance in any way. At least in Skyrim, despite putting the main quests off for... almost forever, I could get momentarily jazzed by exploring a new dungeon, crafting new weapons, potions and enchantments, building up my homestead. Cyberpunk 2077's level scaling sours both the combat and crafting, its apartments can't be customized (and once I found the delightfully shabby Northside one I lost interest in others) plus I already got the only car I want.

Quit snickering, it gets three million pixels to the gallon!

The high point so far have been the side-quests, which not only display some nice, professional level design but contain just enough flavor text to each paint an entertaining vignette of life in the city. But as I've been clearing those off board after board, I've been gradually losing interest in mercenary work altogether and launching the game for ten or twenty minutes at a time to just wander around and take in the numerous slices of Night City life, like kids playing virtual hopscotch.

Oh come on, a piece of chalk must cost, like, a fraction of an implant, economize ya lil' shits! Anyway, overall, a modern setting offers less room for the more involved delving of a single, unitary "dungeon" so there's no real feeling of escalation to any of it. Escalation takes more planning.

 

I never did get around to trying Vagrus' new zone. When I left off, I'd just finished a massive inspiraling sweep of the map, polishing off Finndurarth, Nedir and Harvek's companion quests at the same time as cashing in a lot of smaller contracts, battles and investments.

Excess livestock: the best problem.

Gotta appreciate those 400 silver wallet bumps. But knowing I'll need to devote a fair bit of focus to my next twenty-step plan to avoid forgetting crucial details, I parked my comitatus back at newbietown with an empty inventory and clear ledger, and there it's been awaiting my triumphant scheming return for half a year. I'll be saddlin' up some giant ant mounts next time! If there is a next time...

 

There are many issues with the DLC-spam business model as a subset of the game-as-service, microtransaction mentality writ large. Its popularity spread with multiplayer games which ensured almost universal playerbase buy-in. Everyone else is buying the new expansion. Do or get left behind. But single-player lacks that social network addiction as a crutch, leaving only the game's quality as incentive for the next buy-in. How sure are you of your appeal?

 

Then of course there's the issue of demanding your customers pay full price for the bare skeleton of a product, which is why I bought Europa Universalis 4 a decade after its release.

 

Then there's the diminishing returns angle, as latter DLCs get more and more sparse to keep bleeding a supposedly addicted audience with the least effort, which is why I haven't bought the last few years' worth of Stellaris DLCs.

 

At the conjunction of the previous two points you find the limitation of tacking extra features onto a basic system not made for them. I've addressed at some length D&D's problem trying to sell extra classes, modules and settings, when what it so obviously needs is to break down the primitive min-maxing, over-randomized fighter/wizard/thief setup from half a century ago - but the fanboys would never stand for it. Age of Wonders 4 has been scraping that limit with its latter expansions, deftly interspersing yet not touching the core limitations of its six magic affinities.

 

Worse (here we reach my eventual point) you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't, because in electronic-land, a full revamp will probably not be playable with older content. These days, that's a problem. Last year when I joked about needing spreadsheets to keep track of various options I've used (or not) as I jump between games every few months, I started by complaining Frostpunk 2 had killed my last city with its heat management patch. Now that seems to be ramping up into a trend. Low Magic Age (one of those perpetually "in beta" types) has barred my level 13-ish party from continuing. Darkest Dungeon 2 wiped my existing "confession" (a.k.a. campaign) at some point. Worst of all, my excitement at a new Mount&Blade expansion (Bannerlord's got vikings now - on boats!) was severely dampened when it forced me to retire the Marquis of Baltakhand, aged though he now be. Even porn games are starting to nuke old saves, and if you think an RPG party wipe is anti-climactic, try getting caught mid-thrust! 

 

While I don't deny the financial necessity for start-ups or fringe developers to literally buy themselves more development time with piecemeal content, add nuking players' saves as further evidence of post-launch content's limited tenability, no matter how well it worked for No Man's Sky. This is especially true as strategy/RPG campaigns have stretched longer and longer. A Frostpunk city represents a couple days' worth of gameplay. Bad enough. But the likes of Rogue Trader or Baldur's Gate 3 boast 200-hour campaigns. Not an option for them. If the basic idea is that such expansions will come after players have had a year or three to get bored of their existing characters, I refer you to my Vagrus example. Some concepts are playable only by extended, devoted effort, after which you might let the experience marinate for a bit before jumping in again. Not because you're bored, but because you're savoring it... or maybe precisely because you tell yourself you'll play once the next DLC comes out, not realizing it'll murderize yer marquis.

 

So, two or three main issues:

 

1) Micro-doses of content can much more easily be added to dumbed-down gamplay where you just end up wandering aimlessly about, as in Cyberpunk. I don't know if those hopscotch brats were there from launch, and I don't have to care. Even if they did anything it wouldn't affect my trade run... because there is no trade run. No planning. Just mindless twitch-FPS dust-ups. But if I saw a DLC drop for Vagrus when my character was mid-circuit, I would deliberately delay buying it, possibly by months (and it went on sale) until I was safe in town with no outstanding warrants and able to accommodate any landscape changes.

 

2) One of the big problems with post-launch content has been training your customers to refuse buying anything at launch pricing on the assumption they'd only be missing out on later stuff 'n junk anyway. Now pile that on with conditioning them to actively dread expansions killing their characters. Bad enough to market a pig in a poke, but when the revealed cat claws your face off...

("Lately, I'm not the only one

I say never trust anyone") 

 

3) As the entire industry is presumably re-tooling to fill games with spammed, dirt-cheap AI slop as content, the artsier fringe must at long last bite the bullet and start marketing itself not as low-budget small-time indie side-show attractions, but as more expensive, artisanal interactive media. Go organic. Advertise your Amish hand-crafting. Charge more. Take more time to develop. Put out singular, coherently-crafted campaigns from start to finish. Move on to the next and hope your work was good enough to earn you name brand trust. Low prices and DLC spam will soon be synonymous with The Slop.

Cutting through the Treacle: Raiders of the Leisure Park

"He did pretend to play golf, but he could not see any particular point in stopping a good walk to wallop small balls"

Sinclair Lewis - It Can't Happen Here

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"The more you suffer

The more it shows you really care"

 

The Offspring - Self Esteem

_____________________________________ 

"There seems a broad consensus not even so much that work is good but that not working is very bad; that anyone who is not slaving away harder than he'd like at something he doesn't especially enjoy is a bad person, a scrounger, a skiver, a contemptible parasite unworthy of sympathy or public relief."

[...]

[Citing an interviewee] "it is one of the guiding principles of social relations here: if you're not destroying  your mind and body via paid work, you're not living right."

David Graeber - Bullshit Jobs

_____________________________________

"He had no pride in his business nor any initiative; his only virtues were not doing certain things and hard work. [...] There was a sort of base honourableness about toil, however needless, in that system of inversion."

H.G. Wells - Tono-Bungay

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I still play Northgard occasionally. While hardly the best strategy game, it continues to bait me into reinstalling every year or so. Then I end up uninstalling it for annoyance at its combat mechanics and the computer cheating as it usually does in such games. I especially hate it including a designated griefer class.

As the raven clan represents The All-Father himself, you might excuse a bit of overpower. The problem being they gave it a lot more bit. Its main gimmick is sending boats of mercenaries to raid any player at any time. Attacking without risking its own population would be a powerful enough ability in itself (the lynx clan gets by well enough with that alone) but the mercs are dirt-cheap, roughly match the growth curve of a faction's military by themselves, and give only a three-second warning when they're about to hit, giving the defender no chance to relocate his army which is probably at the other end of his territory since the shore is every player's starting zone. Sure, you can relocate your workers and let the raid complete, but simply losing access to that resource production for the duration is, again, a hefty punishment in itself. Most relevant to my upcoming point, these attacks can be spammed. You'll likely get hit more often by raven raids than by every other source put together.

 

But of course there's more to it than just giving Odin his due pomp and circumstance bonus. To game designers, the spam is a goal in itself.

 

Old World, another strategy game, turn-based this time, reminded me of this while bashing my head against it trying to actually finish a match with Hatti. The principal issue being that sometime during the past year, Mohawk ramped up one of their more annoying features I'd previously held off on disabling, distant raids. Basically, cities at the edge of the map (which would otherwise be relatively safe) get randomly hit with barbarian invasions from offscreen. Stronger ones, in fact, than you would encounter when fighting an actual barbarian city present on the map. Note the five units coming in at the top of the image, the devastation from the previous five units I'd wiped out during the last two turns, and if you check the minimap, five more little red dots below the visible area. What was once an occasional three-mook digression is now forcing you to divert all your military forces, if you can even afford it. A fifteen-mook pile-up is more or less... a war.

For a bonus, when I hit the main menu to disable the stupid raids, I discovered this previously separate mechanic had been folded into the general "difficulty" setting, making it impossible to, say, play under the harsher resource handicap without also accepting the pop-up barbies. Note they actually went out of their way to remove that setting after implementation, to restrict players' options years after the fact. This also came at the same time that raider AI was tweaked to have them prioritize causing random damage instead of trying to beat your defenders (a.k.a. griefing) and soon after disasters were implemented, which also break random improvements requiring reconstruction. Triple redundancy, all toward randomly breaking your shit with no recourse.

 

A quarter century ago, or certainly by the era of Civilizations 3 and 4, developers had gradually begun phasing out the old '90s "whack-a-mole" mechanics (like the series' nuclear fallout requiring individual cleanup) in favor of rarer events more threatening individually but less of a constant chore. Now it appears the moles are back in town.

Why?

 

I mean, sure, from the company's point of view, never ignore the timesink factor. Every designer, every screenwriter, every Dickens loves 'em sum filler, and the raids increase the number of clicks required to get through the middle portion (expand > exploit) of a campaign. Also, the newer generation of strategy games all introduce a limiting resource which cannot be increased by normal territorial/economic expansion to put the brakes on players' steamrolling. Old World's answer to AoW4 / Stellaris' influence or EU4's monarch powers is Orders, and nothing eats up orders faster than fighting. Problem being this so artificially yanks that choke-chain around players' necks that one would think they'd protest the change. Do they?

 

I caused a bit of indignation on an MMO guild forum some 15-20(?) years ago when some cretin demanded to know "you think you better than us" and I replied "yes, because I make things harder for myself" and in my defense I did not in fact consider this so heinous a departure from mundane gamer braggadocio. Every schmuck brags about having beaten difficulty level N+1. Was it so different from me refusing to use an overpowered item in order to beat difficulty N? Because I'm really quite good at making my own life harder; you don't have to help me with that. In Old World, in fact, I roleplay and self-handicap by establishing perennial Platonic philosopher king rule. (One reason I hatey Hatti is that it lacks a researcher family, but I make do with bureaucrats.) This blocks me from what gameplay options Scholar heads of state cannot undertake (like proposing alliances) and imposes a constantly mounting relations penalty from the two families whose purpurous keisters shalt never toucheth the ivory throne of academe, eventually resulting in rebel units spawning at their cities. In other words, I make my own distant raids.

 

I don't doubt that if I shop around I will find more examples of random spawns and other busywork being re-added to various genres. It fits too well with other idiot-friendly trends of the past few years like the decline of online FPS back to deathmatch or the final replacement of ever-shrinking MMO raids with individual Diablo-clone loot grinding.

 

So sure, idiot-friendly simplification is one issue, and those same idiots tend to interpret hyperactivity as excitement, and repetition can be addictive... but is that all? Because I think Old World has finally elucidated the real outrage I caused on that forum back around 2009. It wasn't about who's playing the more difficult challenge. It's the 'for myself' that rankled most. Playing an unoptimized build, giving my fighter 14 STR instead of 18, denying the desirability of the supposed 'best' status symbols for which others struggle. Smashing their tablets of virtues. All so evil.

 

Because to the average retard, all definitions must be imposed from above. The value of effort in a game is no different from the value of effort in real life, that is to say a reflection of one's affiliation with the apes at the top of the tribe's power hierarchy. So just as in real life 'work' does not count as such unless it is servitude to multibillionnaires, playing a game gets defined not by an objective weighing and multifaceted combination of advantages and handicaps, of what would make for interesting gameplay, but by ticking off lists of achievements and top scores arbitrarily defined by the marketing department. At the same time, note the powergamer outrage at anyone refusing to take every obvious advantage (e.g. min-maxing stats) despite such advantages again being defined and handed out by authority and not a reflection of the player's creativity. They want to be made to work at the game just as they play at working the job they are made to keep in meatspace. It's Nietzschean slave morality at its basest, defining oneself by the master's goals, and it's hardly the first time I've cited this tendency in computer games. *

 

It's funny, when MMOs first came out shortly before Y2K with their initial subscription models, the sheer effort involved prompted many to decry "that sounds like a second job more than a game" yet a quarter century later the only facet of online games which remains is the job aspect. Gone are forty-man raids and organization and complex character builds and malleable playable worlds. Now just do what you're told. Punch the clock religiously for your daily log-in rewards. Kill ten to the tenth rats for an achievement unlock. Cheat and sabotage your coworkers. Powerlevel. Grind the single easiest instance for constant loot. After a brief revival of more interesting gameplay around the mid-2010s, the same pattern is reasserting itself in single-player. No complex morality, no complex narratives, no complex goals. Goblin pops up. Smack it with a mallet. Get a LEVEL UP! message.

 

Sure, it's only one facet of our society-wide decline. Humans are less and less self-directed in their thoughts and actions, led by the nose by religious indoctrination and state propaganda and advertising and more recently social media echo chambers and even more recently copy-pasting chatbots. But observing how thoroughly it pervades even our escapist fantasies gives the lie to accusations of nefarious manipulation from above. It sells. It's the rabble dragging us down. It is the human animal, the naked ape which does not want to think and continually retrenches in mindless reaction of its own accord. Subhumanity kills.

 

 

 

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* If you don't think games reflect the morality of our corporate overlords, lemme ask ya this: have any of your Civilizations ever hit a crisis of overproduction? Or is maximizing profit and extracted labor always the right answer?

(There is one golden oldie which slightly bucked the trend, Alpha Centauri and Planet's revolt against industry.)

Inkulinati

"Liber scriptus proferetur

In quo totum continetur"

- one of the world's most endlessly sampled tunes

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It's a meandering monastic menagerie mêlée! 

How the hell has Daedalic Entertainment stayed in business so long? Well, I guess their development studio actually hasn't, and my various complaints about Blackguards 2 might points to reasons why. Even as publishers though, they seem to work with tiny start-ups with big dreams but little expertise or inspiration. To be fair, I haven't outright hated the likes of Iratus or, say, Valhalla Hills, but they've tended to desperately imitate bigwigs' industry standards and end up cluttering their gameplay with pointless "features" until it all washes out to mediocre offerings. (Lending the skeleton's catchphrase from Iratus a bit of meta-humour.)

 

So Inkulinati proved a pleasant surprise. (And I could do with a couple of those after Bloodlines 2's shit-show.) Budget TBS. The basic mechanics are nothing new: squad management with individual combats placed on a lattice of possible encounters inspired by roguelikes and the like-like. It relies on its artwork for most of its appeal, imitating medieval illustrations. Though resigned to cheap two-dimensional, 2FPS animations, it manages to own their goofy, awkward, primitive yet expressive (dare one say "iconic") antics. So if besting St. Frankie in a scribble contest with the power of bean gas and bunny butts is one of your life's dreams, well, have at it. The basic pretext is that you're medieval scribes battling it out on paper using the resource of "living ink" to summon armies of beasties. I do think they took it one step too far by having a human hand interpose to do the actual drawing.

I am so gonna knock Hilda's holy pussy!

Nothing so human should taint my alternate reality. But maybe that's just my lingering FMV trauma talking. It also falls prey to so many designers' impulse to stick some twitch-gaming element into everything (cf. Gemini Rue's gunfights or the old Oregon Trail rapids sequence) by making you click to time your attacks as the pointer oscillates among damage numbers.

Thankfully it's not too overwhelmingly twitchy, but still interferes nonsensically into an otherwise completely turn-based system. The writing, ironically for a game played on manuscripts, is barely there, just a bit of random nonsense. And it's not like FTL didn't demonstrate such a game can benefit from flavor text. 

 

Aside from that though, Inkulinati takes some of its best cues from the previous decade's good surprises like Darkest Dungeon or Into the Breach. Combat is linear with extra levels thrown in connected by ladders, and force-moving units offers both collision damage and one-shot kills if tossed off the page. Hazards are plentiful and varied, status effects deceptively difficult to work around (I just lost a match against monkeys because the headaches they caused prevented my melee-heavy team from moving and attacking in the same round) and resource scarcity weighted just enough to make you value an extra drop here and there. A fatigue mechanic encourages you to switch things up without completely blocking you from favoring your favorites. Minor differences between the various beast squads combine into new experiences.

 

Look, I'm not praising this thing just because they made the wolf a support caster! It's basically what Iratus or Darkest Dungeon 2 could've been without the tacked-on timesinks and other filler. Though limited in scope, this brand of thoughtfully interweaving mechanics and honest charm are exactly why we keep holding out hope for indie gaming.

 

 

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P.S.: Why the infernus did it take me four tries to find even a half-decent English translation of Dies Irae of all things, one of history's most famous pieces of music? Can't you just hum along if you don't know the Latin? Why do "conservative" segments of society feel the need to reinvent their own supposedly sacred culture until its texts are unrecognizable? I may be an atheist but it's my cultural heritage too; quit fuckethin' with it, William Josiah Irons!

 

P.P.S.: And if you think the fart jokes are a bit much, no, they are perfectly apt, you've obviously just never run across that wagon wheel thing in The Canterbury Tales.

Setting the Netting

"If it happens again I shall worry

That only a strange ship could fly"

 

Sting - The Wild, Wild Sea 

 

 

My recent Europa Universalis 4 campaign surprised me with a bit more novelty than I thought it could muster after half a dozen runs. For one thing, like Scotland and in contrast to the Teutons or Uzbek Khanate, Aragon runs into an old problem of finding a job for Aquaman. Ever since I got into strategy games in the '90s, ever since Civ 2, C&C: Red Alert and Warcraft 2, the idea of having two separate realms of gameplay has run into constant balance issues. A hard distinction between land and sea units leaves ships either utterly useless or utterly crucial. In particular, the need for transports to carry land units raises a whole separate balance issue of vulnerability. Is it fair for an embarked unit with 20 armor to get sunk because its transport only has 2?

 

Though I eschewed the New World colonial race this time around, the Spanish armada nonetheless proved crritical to not only protecting my various island holdings but denying enemies quick deployment. For instance the Ottoman Empire vastly outnumbered me on land, but forcing it to schlep across the North-African coast by foot bought me the time to siege its ally Morocco before reinforcements could reach. It's a bit all-or-nothing. Once I had that naval superiority... I had it. End of story. My fleet only grew with the scores upon scores of vessels I captured, for free, with enemies unable to even deny me safe harbors without conquering me completely, since every coastal province can dock infinity vessels. It's always completely one-sided. One side of every war rules the waves and is the only one who can ship troops. What, no sneaky black sails under cover of darkness? Especially looking at Britain utterly failing to control The Channel across several playthroughs, I kept flashing back to Dunkirk and wondering why I can't commandeer a bunch of merchant vessels for some kind of limited access beyond the old Warcraft spiky turtle dependence.*

 

At least ships providing faster travel for a logistic advantage and not just a numeric one is a solid concept, though it can be taken too far. I don't know what Civilization's doing these days, but its competitor Old World gives every ship a next-turn "anchor" action establishing a traversable radius around it so long as it remains inactive. You can chain these zones to create pontoon bridges over infinite distances.

While my navy was too small for a full-scale invasion, I eked a narrow victory over the Carthaginians there by quickly anchoring my few ships and snagging a couple of low-value city sites in the southeast, impractically far from the mainland and with too little land around them for any other purpose but a couple of extra points. But making the crossing nigh-instantaneous can be stupidly overpowered.

Playing as Greece (bloo) vs. Assyria (yeller) our war quickly degenerated into a perpetual stalemate. The sole overland route connecting west and east consisted of exactly three hexes at the very northern edge of the map (the rest being a mountain range all the way to the sea) making it impossible for either side to mount or reinforce a push. Island-hopping along the center archipelago (two turns to cross half the map) was a nice strategic challenge, and opening up that second front all the way across their empire (as EU4's algorithm tries to do every single war) did indeed lead to eventual victory. Not risking instantaneous unit loss when losing a transport is a nice change (your units either can cross or cannot, and do so in a single turn spending no time at sea) but turning creaky triremes into infinite-range, effortless science fantasy teleporters is a bit much.

 

Age of Wonders does have teleporters, and has done away with naval transports. Much as in Heroes of Might and Magic, units "embark" when you order them into water and fight under some penalties unless they're aquatic/amphibious/flying. For some little while at the start it did feature actual ships as naval units, but eliminated even those as extraneous. Not an ideal situation either, as it removes some player decision-making in deliberately building up sea power.

 

Weird how long the naval transport issue has gone without a clear best option. My own personal favorite would be something like a more purposeful, resource-dependent version of HoMM/AoW "embarking" which stuck in my mind ever since playing Armageddon: allowing the player to buy a motorized transport for each unit as upgrade, of varying quality, activated at will. Of course, "my little pocket ponies" were even mocked in old MMOs, and in some settings like historical grand strategy, seeing your infantry pull a galleon out of its ass may look just a mite queer.

 

Can't wait to see how Bannerlord handles this in its Viking expansion.

 

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* There is a reason for this limited interpretation in mass media dominated for eighty years by Americans' obsession with their moment of glory at D-day, a rare example where the question really was an all-or-nothing, massive disembarkation from purpose-made transports.

 

There's an even simpler marketing-driven explanation for keeping transports as separate units for so long, as every company wanted to drive up its unit count as volume of content.

Are A Gonner Universalis

After my establishment and subsequent loss of Nova Scotia last campaign, preceded by Uzbek and Teuton playthroughs, I wasn't quite sure what to play next. Maybe another European nation before tackling the Indian Ocean, but I'm not too enchanted with the way New World colonies are handled in EU4 (automatically breaking away from your direct control as permanent vassals) so maybe something in the North? Maybe something in the East? Maybe some- wait, it turns out I already chose Aragon some months ago and forgot about it, so I guess we're playing Aragon.

 

Likely true of 15th-century Aragon historically, I appear a naval power. Mallorca, Malta, Sardinia, Sicily, not to mention my most obvious route for early expansion lies along the North-African coast, plus my hardcoded pahtnah Naples is only reachable by love boat.

The biggest problem of course is starting at a disadvantage next to the two worst superpowers, France and Castile, so I decided to pursue an anti-French strategy. Allied Savoy, Burgundy and Castile in addition to my junior partner Naples to start.

- 1447 lose Naples in a scripted event, inherit a personal union with Navarre by royal marriage

- 1456 Castille calls me in against Morocco and Tunis as part of its Granada campaign. Oh no, not the briar patch! And, shockingly, Castille actually awards me three provinces around Kabylia in the peace treaty, giving me a North-African foothold.

- 1460 Iberian Wedding event makes Castille junior partner

- 1467 still putting down revolts, lose my Burgundian alliance for refusing to defend them against France - turns out it would have been a pointless fight anyway, as after the war France immediately takes over all of Burgundy in a dynastic event

- 1473 Ally England as traditional ally against France

- 1488 England calls me in to defend against France. Not much chance of success. Predictably, England sits back and does absolutely nothing while France over-runs the Iberia Peninsula. At least I have Castilla watching my back. Almost bankrupting myself with 25 loans buys me enough mercenaries to eke out a truce.

- 1499 Integrate Navarre. Despite being 22 loans in debt, I declare war on Tunisia again and annex it. Need... tax... infidels...

- 1501 Ally with His Popeness, maybe the threat of excommunication will keep the Gauls off my back.

- 1505-1515 Lose Savoy Alliance to a forced annulment from France. Try to ally Florence as a future vassal, but it's conquered by France first. Try to ally Bologna as a future vassal but it's vassalized by France first. Try to ally Corsica... and I finally get one.

- 1528 France attacks the Papal State and again I'm in no position to help. I finally pay off my loans. Corsica annexed. Now to wait for corruption (from currency debasement) to decrease.

- 1552 France attacks again, before I can catch up in tech. England just wanders along the French shoreline constantly pulling its armies back before taking even a single province. Game over.

--------------------------

Attempt 2

Try allying France and Castile this time around. Refuse Naples' independence dynastic event, and by some amazing stroke of luck no-one supports its independence. Same with Castilla. So the game now shifts to holding out long enough to integrate my vassals.

1461 Invade Tunis, take northern coast.

1464 France invades Provence. This is the first war it's started, in contrast to its immediate expansion last game.

1490 Genoa conquered by Milan leaving Corsica free to be Vassalized by me, even if it puts me at a diplomatic power penalty. Morocco and Tlemcen ally Ottomans, making them untouchable for the time being.

1492 Begin integrating Napoli, with a fortuitous Nobility Diet quest negating the diplomatic penalty for doing so. Ally Saluzzo and Padua with an eye toward vassalization and annexation. My Diplomatic power income becomes 0 for a couple years.

1495 Integrate Navarre. France Invades Burgundy. England's French provinces still untouched.

1501 Vassalize Aquileia. Grant privileges to the Nobility and Clergy to offset my lengthy and costly subject integrations.

1513 Finish integrating Naples, annex Corsica and Padua, Ally Mantua. Begin the painstaking process of integrating Castille

1529 Ally Ragusa when it breaks away from Hungary. Invade Jolof without casus belli just to get a head start on African expansion.

1544 Expanded farther into Africa via Fulo and Kaabu.

1556 Tlemcen lost its Ottoman defense, so invade it and Morocco.

1569 After 56 years(!) Castile is finally integrated. Ragusa and Aquileia annexed. Mantua Vassalized. Trent allied. Spain formed.

1582 Mop up the remnants of Kaabu

1584 Annex Mantua and Trent, vassalize Savoy which has been pared down to a couple of provinces, though like Saluzzo, I can't annex it for lack of adjacency.

1589 Ally His Popeness and lay a claim on Tuscany in preparation for baiting its ally Milan into a war sometime in the future. However, I am three techs behind, so I wait for the moment and build up my economy. My expansion into western Africa has apparently caused a defensive block to form between Songhai, Hausa and Yao, so no advancing in that direction yet. All in all, the map of Western Europe has remained rather static for the first century and a half.

1594

1601 War against Yatenga to bait its guarantor Hausa out of its other alliances.

1616 France loses its great power status.

1625 Invade Tuscany with Fronse and His Popeness. Milan and others defend. Manage to take Genoa's old provinces plus Pisa, but get coalitioned (but not attacked) by Hungary, Austria and a gaggle of German principalities for my trouble. Rush to ally Bavaria, Magdeburg, Strasburg and Three Leagues in defense. If this breaks out into war it'll wreck the Holy Roman Empire. (Thankfully I had invested some "improve relations" diplomat time just in case something like this happens.

Situation... stable.

1632 At long last I have the adjacency to annex Savoy and Saluzzo.

1649 Bohemia declares independence from Hungary (which controls all of Eastern Europe) with France's support. The coalition against me falls apart, leaving me free to... steer clear of Italy for a while, just in case, and push on into Africa's darkest. The remnants of Hausa give me a back-door war declaration against Songhai.

1653 Britain (along with Austria, Morocco and pretty much all of North America) takes advantage of the recent wars to declare war on France. Unable to abandon my most valuable alliance, I reluctantly accept. Cue loans and mercenaries, being at 0 manpower. On Land, Morocco and I focus each other. At sea though, the indomitable Spanish armada make out like... some kind of sea bandits?

- capturing 40+ vessels. Who rules the waves now, putas? After five years of World War -1, in 1658 I get exactly one province out the whole mess.

1662 The PayPal State (no joke, they're loaded) wants to invade Milan... which is Allied with Hungary and Russia. I'm still paying off debts from the last war and haven't rebuilt my military, so, umm, no. I need to spend some quality time with the fam. They force Milan to free another province from old Savoy, Torino... which it so happens I have a claim on. I also happen to have an army right next door. Thanks? You can have this shroud back though, it's dirty.

1675 Bavaria pulls me back into Italian politics faster than I had wanted with an invasion against The Palatinate and its ally Milan. Luckily, since my Aragonese missions auto-core the Mediterranean coast, the computer conquers provinces in my name. Too bad I can only grab a couple or risk another coalition.

1688 Invade Tuscany with all my allies except France, hoping they'll do most of my fighting for me since I'm behind in military tech. It works gloriously. Grab Parma, force them to release Ferrara for my vassalization pleasure. Grab Tuscany's last two provinces. Whaddaya know Jerry, there really a-was-a house in Toscana! Except Three Leagues, my own ally, sacks my capital after liberating it from a siege. I mean, okay, predictable enough behavior for the 1600s, but still, dude, not cool! I'm gonna make the pope proclaim a bull of not cool!

1690s I want to continue my African expansion, but Magdeburg and then Bavaria keep pulling me into Holy Roman Shit. I don't dare give up their alliances though, as France keeps losing ground to Britain. Zilch on territory gains.

1700 Enlightenment appears... in Hanseong, Korea. Okaaayyy... and here I'd been putting up universities in a hurry to rush it for once.

1708 Finally annex Ferrara during a lull in the wars.

1716 France revolts and breaks all its alliances. After all that?!? Swap in Utrecht as my new ally. Buy Enlightenment, tech up to 25 and invade Songhai. Yes, I'm aware of the enlightened irony, but it's now or never. Given I'd forgotten to upgrade my forts (and they hadn't) it turns into a nasty war of attrition lasting until '23.

Mean 250k-strong peasant rebellions after the war too. Yes, multiple ones.

1729 Magdeburg (now Saxony) and Bavaria keep dragging me into wars for their own expansion when what I'd like to do is rebuild my military for a strike on a now weakened France fighting off counter-revolutionary attacks. At least I'm rich enough to keep some mercenaries on my payroll permanently. By the time I finish a time-consuming invasion of Bohemia (ruining my relation with them) just so Saxony can annex one stinkin' province, my window for moving on France has closed. And all because of Freakin' Pomerania once again, I swear, what is your major malfunction, Rostock?

1739 Britain hits France again, creating... maybe... an opportunity? Three Leagues joins the revolution and breaks alliance... but not before pulling me into a war against Switzerland causing Hungary to jump in as well, so once again I can't afford to capitalize on France's troubles.

Grab Utrecht as replacement ally. And then Strasbourg calls me into another war against Baden. Saxony breaks its alliance to also join the Three Leagues war against me. Freakin' Pomerania! Ally Bohemia. Utrecht breaks its alliance as well to join in this piddling little war that has almost cost me the game by this point, because by 1743 anti-war revolts are already starting to break out. I pay 6800+ ducats just to get out of the damn quagmire. Re-ally Utrecht and (against my better judgment) Freakin' Pomerania.

1750 Bohemia breaks its alliance to stick by France, after I'd tried buttering them up to break up the bloc. Fine, be that way. Still giving me no chance to move against France, the Turks invade me. (And I was aready fighting Otto-mans up North!) I let my allies handle the Eastern front (about time they made themselves useful) and focus on knocking Morocco and Hausa out early, before going head-on against a solid million janissaries. Again the Spanish armada triumphs, capturing 57 ships in a single battle. And a big thank you to all the West-Africans rebelling against me only to whittle down Ottoman armies instead. Herzegovina changes hands about six? seven? times over five years (man, they just cannot catch a break over there) and by '55 I settle for grabbing the Barbary Coast from Morocco then just some cash to wrap things up before allies bail and attrition and rebellions lose this for me. Phew. Close one.

1757 Strasbourg gets vassalized by Hungary when I'm not looking. Ally Austria as replacement. Saxony and Bavaria spend the next few years mopping up revolutionary statelets in the HRE. Now if only someone would distract Fronse long enough for me to snag that southern border... in '59 the Brits decide to do just that, let's see how it goes.

1761 Finish Offensive Ideas for that +5 discipline bonus, grab the Horse Artillery policy (+10% artillery power) proclaim my golden age for a morale bonus, take a deep breath and (even though I'm below half my manpower reserves) invade France. Crush the revolution! Scatter the peasant scum! (capture a bit of real estate while we're at it) for our rightful ancestral rightness of rights!

They can't possibly beat all this... can they?

Complicating matters, my ally Utrecht ends up on the other side of the conflict through a different war, and the bellicose gauls tech up to military level 28 two years before I can. Luckily they spend their initial efforts on the Brits as planned and I manage to hold the southern half of their territory, and the Bavarians hold off their Bohemian allies.

Paris falls in March '63, by '64 Bavaria already throws in the towel, so I cut things off at a 48-point peace offer. (Ooopsie, guess I forgot to crush the revolution. That might still kill me if the Brits don't pick up the slack.)

1779 I'd love to keep expanding into Africa, but with its alliance busy against Russia the past couple of years, I doubt I'll get a better chance at France before the game ends. This time I trounce 'em. Aaand it might get me coalitioned, but what the hey, let's capture gay gris Paris. Weirdly, that somehow still does not crush the revolution.

1785 Yet another invasion of the bicentennial Songhai/Morocco/Yao alliance. Gimme. Annex the first, nibble a bit from the others. Most African nations now coalition against me (but don't attack) and y'know, I kinda can't blame 'em. Ten years later, that coalition against me is... still growing? With the Ottomans and France?

1809 Coalition finally disbands.

1811 My golden age expires. For a last hurrah, invade Milan. Hungary and Frronse defend, Bavaria, Austria, Utrecht and His Popeness help me. (The Saxons are conveniently busy fighting the Turks. Freakin' Pomerania. I. Swear!) Knock France out by '15, Hungary by '17, wait until 1820/01/01 to annex Milan due to the inevitable coalition that will this time certainly declare war against me.

Caribbean inherited from Castilla. Not pictured: Greenland.

Conclusions?

1) Unlike my other playthroughs, this campaign had two distinct phases. Until the early-mid 1500s I sank massive amounts of diplomatic power into peaceful annexation, aided by Aragon's quite generous scripted events. With that firm economic base you can move on to forceful expansion afterward.

2) Weirdly, allying France put the brakes on its expansion far more surely than opposing it. It declared war less often, never incorporated its British holdings and fought to a draw with the HRE while rarely calling me in - for fear I'd take half its victims' lunch money or what?

3) Even weirder is how safe Portugal has been in every single playthrough so far. The only one positioned to snatch it up at first is Castile, which has a more immediate problem with Morocco. And that's only if its English alliance gets weakened somehow. After it inevitably balloons into a colonial empire, Portugal's just more trouble than it's worth for its moderate province yield.

4) A Spanish run is Hardcore Catholic. I'd never gotten into it before, but Papal Influence kinda rocks. Sure, the bonuses aren't huge for their lengthy accrual, but they cover areas otherwise hard to address, especially during the early game, like inflation or construction cost. The stability recovery alone saved me well over a thousand administrative power. And the south gives you oh-so-many Muslim provinces to convert for Popery Points.

5) Opposite of Prussia's very high army professionalism, I depended heavily on mercenaries, and thus repeatedly shrugged off initial military losses, winning mostly by attrition. I only noticed when the Economic Hegemon title became available that it includes merc bonuses, so this appears very much by design. Naval power plays into this as well, but I'll address that as an intro to my next post.

6) The Revolution mechanic's weird. I'd assumed capturing the epicenter of the movement (Paris) would allow me to... y'know, DO SOMETHING about it, domestically, but instead it just sits there at 100% completion spawning endless revolts. So the only option to take it down is to declare war with that singular purpose while the center remains foreign. Not the most elegant or nuanced way of handling such a world-changing event. Granted, Revolutionary France really did get dogpiled in real life, but still...

7) Too much of EU4 revolves around gaming the alliance system for ridiculous back-door war declarations denying your enemies their more lucrative allies, especially as your victims' remaining friends rarely take advantage of existing wars, and the coalition system can itself be gamed, if anything, more easily by big empires attacking different geographic regions than by medium-sized nations which must expand in a single region. See my alternating Europe/Africa expansion, and I'm not even good at it. My main gripe remains; the game's designed to favor the big dogs for high score dick-measuring.

8) Computer opponents' insane military strategy prevents Europa Universalis from really standing against other competitors purely as a war game. (Though it more than compensates in other aspects.) Most strikingly, the AI is obsessed with hitting your farthest provinces. It will entirely forego defense for that purpose. While, yes, hitting your soft spot can weaken your economic backing for the war and force you to split your forces, it more often splits the enemy forces even worse, as it usually means longer travel time for them when you can take the shortcut.

Prime example:

Taking the Ragusa and Herzegovina provinces in 1529 made them my best military asset by far, pound for pound, as in every single war the AI prioritized and over-invested in conquering them as a weak spot I'd be unable to protect. Yeah. And also unwilling, uncaring and uninterested to protect. Hungary, the Ottomans, Milan, Bohemia, all of them spent years and armies trudging around the Adriatric while I focused far more important objectives and established a solid, contiguous front line. Moreover, since my allies shared the same obsession, it resulted in a hilarious back-and-forth as the fortress got taken, re-taken, un-taken, tooken, tokened and Tookished half a dozen times during a couple of the lengthier engagements.

But hey, I guess we can call that an apt illustration of the region's history.